The Jew's Daughter by Sicher Efraim;Kohler Noa Sophie;

Author:Sicher, Efraim;Kohler, Noa Sophie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

You stole it! The last treasure,

The God of hatred you took from me.

You said, when I asked you about your faith:

“God is love”, and I was converted.

Joseph declares in the tryst in the woods that they will set off on a new path of the religion of love (echoing the Christian notion that God is love, and perhaps Feuerbach’s religion of humanity). As Ruben tells Deborah in Act 4, Jesus was a Jew and the Messiah will come when there is brotherly love.[148] However, the dream of an ecumenical union between Jew and Christian cannot be realized because each belongs to a different nation and religion. According to the paradoxical condition of Enlightenment tolerance that distinguishes between individuals and national groups or views, Christianity is the superior faith, the religion of Reason. The ideal lives on nevertheless, because Jew and Christian have in common their love of humanity (Deborah and Hannah each instinctively reach out to help the Other in their midst, and Joseph petitions the emperor in Vienna to grant rights to the Jews). If Christians will show love for Jews, the play is telling us, this will bring out the best qualities in the Jews. Deborah curses Joseph’s union with Hannah in the spirit of Christian constructs of Jewish hate and vengeance (as we will see also in Scribe/Halévy’s The Jewess), but at the end Deborah is forgiving and departs to join her people, presumably in migration to America.

Mosenthal’s play reflects the political optimism which began in the reign of Joseph II and reached a peak in 1848. It proved to be very popular, and was translated into thirteen languages. However, some German Jews objected to the fact that in the play moral salvation comes about through Christian mercy, very far from the ecumenical universalism of Nathan the Wise. Others complained that in the play social acceptance comes at the price of giving up the Jewish religion, but its performance was popular among liberal circles and Jewish communities in Central Europe as a platform for promoting philosemitism and for defending the principles of the 1848 revolutions against reactions such as Wagner’s 1859 essay “Judaism in Music”; some of the leading ladies, in fact, stirred up passionate identification with the exotic, raging Jewess.[149] Unlike Mosenthal, his mentor Franz Grillparzer did not favor Jewish assimilation and his play Die Jüdin von Toledo (The Jewess of Toledo, 1851; first performed 1872), does not present conversion as an option; instead, the dangerous Belle Juive who has seduced the king and undermined affairs of state is punished.[150] The subversion of the conversion narrative in Mosenthal’s play frustrates the promise of emancipation, that a Jewess could be an equal partner in marriage; however, the terms of “conversion” are now different.

Just as German historical novels drew on Goethe and Schiller, German Jewish historical novels used figures from a mythical Jewish past to introduce into literature the story of an ethnic minority, in particular, the idealized history of Sephardi Jews and conversos, which fit in with

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